South remembers: Shame – Guest: Paolo Colombo

Paolo Colombo, Central Crete, South of Heraklion, Greece. Three in the afternoon, August 20, 2008

Shame

GUEST: Paolo Colombo

This is an image of an intersection of two alleys in a village in Crete named after the two members of the Papandreou dynasty, Andreas and Georgios. The grandfather, Georgios, the father, Andreas, and the son, Georgios, all served as prime ministers of Greece within a 70-year period. Many of Greece’s problems seem to derive from this succession. Andreas’s lavish policies in the 1980s resulted in the significant increase to the country’s public debt and, of course, during Georgios’s recent government Greece entered the financial support mechanism by requesting a loan from the IMF. This ironic image suggests that Greece has been stuck in this small corner or intersection for too many years.